Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Obama Without Romney

Imagine, for a moment, that the 2012 election really was the pure referendum that Mitt Romney’s campaign strategists apparently expected it to be. Imagine that both the Republican challenger and his party were completely invisible on the campaign trail, that the press was allowed only to cover the incumbent, and that on Nov. 6 the choice was whether to vote “up” or “down” on President Obama’s performance. How would the last three weeks have played out for the president?

Not necessarily all that well. They started with Obama’s lackluster convention speech, which seemed to put a ceiling on the bounce that the rest of the Democratic National Convention had created for him. They continued with another mediocre jobs report, followed by the Federal Reserve’s announcement that it would make a third attempt to stimulate the still-stagnant economy with massive bond purchases – a decision that boosted stocks and consumer confidence but also served as an implicit indictment of this administration’s economic stewardship.

Then came a week’s worth of grim news from the Middle East and North Africa, during which time the White House – whose Libya policy has been sold with evasions and dishonesties from the beginning – alternately stonewalled and dissembled on what exactly happened at the American consulate in Benghazi. This unrest in the Arab world coincided with the official end of the Obama-ordered American surge of forces in Afghanistan, which attracted little press coverage but probably deserved more: the surge was one of the president’s biggest foreign policy gambles, and it produced few obvious benefits at a high cost in lives.

Finally the president took to the airwaves for a pair of interviews – with Univision and 60 Minutes – that included a number of awkward moments: a weird attempt to distance himself from his own negative ads; a weirder suggestion that he’s learned as president that “you can’t change Washington from the inside”; and a too-casual dismissal of Middle Eastern unrest and American deaths as mere “bumps in the road.”

There was more than enough material, in other words, to tell the story of a president adrift: overshadowed by Bill Clinton and Ben Bernanke at home; uncertain how to respond to strategic failures abroad; and lacking any obvious vision for what a second term might offer the country beyond a continuation of the current large-deficit, slow-growth slog. (“This is not the time,” David Axelrod said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when asked about the White House’s plans to deal with Social Security’s looming shortfalls.)

Photo

What if Obama were the only candidate?Credit Scott Olson/Getty Images

But instead the story of the last few weeks has been all about Mitt Romney — his campaign’s infighting, his weakening swing-state numbers, his muddled message, his dismissal of 47 percent of Americans as pathetic supporting characters in an Ayn Rand melodrama.

Is this focus just a case of media bias, as many conservatives have alleged? Yes, in the sense that the White House has been getting too free a pass on its absentee domestic policy and shifting foreign policy narratives. As Howard Fineman of the Huffington Post noted this week, Obama is campaigning for re-election “without having to seriously and substantively defend his first-term failed promises or shortcomings, and without having to say much, if anything, about what, if anything, he might do substantially differently if he is fortunate enough to win again.” Yes, too, in the sense that the horse race coverage has sometimes helped ratify the sense that 8 percent unemployment and trillion-dollar deficits are a new normal for which the current president doesn’t actually bear that much responsibility.

But no, in the sense that Romney could have avoided almost all of his current difficulties, media bias or no, through the simple expedient of running a modestly more competent and creative campaign.

Instead, the Republican nominee seems to be running to prove two points about political science and the presidency. First, that every presidential campaign is actually a referendum on the challenger as well as on the incumbent, and second, that it’s entirely possible for voters to ultimately reject a challenger even when they think the incumbent might deserve to be defeated.

In the second point, though, lurks the only remaining hope for the Republican ticket: Their dislike for Romney notwithstanding, voters really are still open to the possibility that Obama might not deserve re-election. This is why 2012 still looks more like 1976 and 2004, when the country split almost down the middle on the question of whether the incumbent should be returned, than it does like the re-election cakewalks of Reagan, Clinton, Nixon or even Ike.

Romney trails – but only by a few points. Obama leads – but with approval and “re-elect” numbers that are only brushing up against the necessary 50 percent. The country has been tilting toward the Democrats – but only for a few short weeks.

There are six weeks to go. In 2004, John Kerry made up about 4 points in the polls between late September and election day. In 2000, George W. Bush gained a similar amount of ground between the conventions and November. Since 1968, Sean Trende points out, in presidential races featuring an incumbent president, the polls have moved an average of 3.7 points toward the challenger between the incumbent’s convention and the actual vote.

As of this writing, Romney trails in the RealClearPolitics polling average by almost exactly that figure – 3.8 points. He has squandered almost two seasons’ worth of opportunities and allowed his failures as a candidate to eclipse his opponent’s failures as a president. But as he prepares for the debates that offer his last best chance, he has one reason to be hopeful: The case he has failed to make is still there to be made.

An earlier version of this column misstated the status of the American diplomatic outpost that was attacked in Benghazi; it was an American consulate, not the American embassy. It also referred imprecisely to the election of 1964; Lyndon B. Johnson was not “re-elected” that year because he had ascended to the presidency after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

What's Next

About

Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.